The Men in her Life

cuddling her into his chest. She switched off the reading-lamp beside her, not wanting him to be able to see her expression.
    ‘Do you realize that I have known you as long as I haven’t known you?’ she asked him.
    ‘As long as that?’ he said, smiling down at her, ‘are you having a mid-life crisis?’
    She laughed weakly as his hand slid from her arm to her waist and began to caress her thigh. She did not respond, hoping that he would sense that she did not feel like it. But he was in an expansive mood, pleased with his performance as a raconteur, and she knew that he wanted a self-congratulatory fuck just as much as she didn’t. He turned onto his side, his erection hard against her leg, then shifted down the bed to suckle at her breast. In the dim light of the moon she looked down at the mass of curls on her chest and thought how peculiarly big his head was. A hand pushed her legs apart, no more forcefully than it ever had, and yet she felt she was being prised open. She closed her eyes in an effort to remember what these same actions had felt like when she loved him, trying to relax her body as if floating on her back in water, but the act of releasing herself to him that had always been so sensual now felt like suffocation. Her body was nothing but a tool for his wank, her vagina a convenient receptacle for his semen. She just wanted it to be over so she could breathe again. She began to quicken the pace, to move him on to orgasm.
    ‘Oh God, you’re beautiful,’ he cried out, ‘my beauty, my love...’
    ‘Say my name,’ she hissed in his ear.
    ‘Oh God... my love...’
    Then he flopped down onto her. His chest hair itched against her breasts. She was clammy with his sweat and disgusted by her own complicity. This is what so many wives who no longer love their husbands trade for the sake of a quiet life for themselves and their children, she thought. But I cannot. Not for long.
    ‘Clare?’ Joss said, opening his eyes, as if he had just remembered who was beneath him.
    ‘Yes?’ she replied through gritted geeth.
    ‘That was fantastic,’ he said and kissed her on her nose.
    For the first time in their relationship, she had faked it, and he had not even known the difference.

Chapter 24

    At the beginning of the day, before the tourist coaches arrived, the Alhambra was almost silent. The air was cool and filled with the watery scent of dew on petals that reminded her of walking past expensive florist shops in Mayfair . Philippa lay on her bed listening to the occasional chink of breakfast crockery being set out on the terrace downstairs.
    There was nothing up here apart from the ruins, the Parador and a couple of cafes, but it was green, like an oasis on a mountain top, and she felt curiously comfortable in the Moorish courtyards, as if her suffering was insignificant in the company of the unquiet ghosts of the Alhambra’s tortured past. It was a place she was certain Jack would have liked, and that knowledge seemed to give her own existence purpose. In a kind of homage to him, she had ventured into the city of Granada to buy books to immerse herself in its history, and discovered, almost to her surprise, that she was interested in learning. Doing something that Jack would have liked seemed to bring him back into focus. Good conversations they had shared rolled agreeably through her mind, and the electric shocks of guilt from their last exchange became less frequent. Whatever he had done cast a new perspective on their life together, she realized, but did not negate it.
    ‘Café con leche, por favor,’’ Philippa said, unfolding the large white napkin onto her lap. The waitress nodded. Sometimes she wondered what stories the staff of the Parador had made up to explain the Englishwoman who read and stared. Did they assume she was a widow, she wondered, or did they just think she was rich and mad? She did not know whether it was politeness, rudeness or inefficiency that made them so indifferent to her presence, but she was grateful. Her spoken words were confined to the choice of tea or coffee at breakfast. At dinner, she pointed at the menu.
    On the other side of the terrace another lone woman was writing postcards. An American, Philippa thought, because you simply couldn’t purchase shorts that size in any other part of the world. The woman looked up from under her coloured straw hat and smiled, but Philippa stared through her. Conversations with strangers could slide into intimacy in less